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Lack of polish, inconsistency, them not really being needed. Non-circular maps are also still working, but it does seem strange that we do consider them to be deprecated and then make use of that for new maps.

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Lack of polish, inconsistency, them not really being needed. Non-circular maps are also still working, but it does seem strange that we do consider them to be deprecated and then make use of that for new maps.

Need design control. Not only are many new map square but some do not fit the theme of the game.

While the screenshots in the release announcement seem fine, round maps look better as they avoid the ugly, sharp, pointy corners.

The players distribution is more equal and more playable, all players have the same distance to the center, thus are reachable equally from all other players. On square maps, players placed in the corners are hard to reach / have a hard time reaching the others.

Square maps of the same "mapsize" have 4/pi times (= +27%) more map area (#4407), accounting for some claimed "new a21 lag".

Unfortunately neither _kali, FeXoR nor me were aware of these aspects, nor the old forum threads and irc discussions, before these random square maps were polished by niektb and those three and finished in July and September (Alpha21 wiki). Only recall Yves noticing it on 2016-09-04 in irc in one sentence.

Just setting isCircular to true in the JSON files and adapting the starting positions in the singleBases, strongholdBases array of _kalis maps is technically sufficient, but not artistically. Most of these maps would lose some playability or visually appealing terrain when cutting off the corners. So the heightmap data would have to be retaken with a larger boundary and the prior heightmap fixes (f.e. shoreline smoothing for docks) would also have to be redone :/

Should we entirely remove the support for random square maps as well and consider square random maps not to be a valid choice for non-vanilla 0 A.D. maps (i.e. for modders and players)? The classic random map "Latium" looks like it is intended to be that way and would lose its uniqueness if converted. Not sure how involved changing Corsica & Sardinia, but likely feasible.

If some maps like Amazon, Ngorongoro and Howe Sound are literally too far out, we can also remove them from vanilla (and move them to attachments of a forum thread). It was also proposed to rename them, but it seemed wrong to me not to name them by the geographical region they actually depict (I might be wrong again).